Amsterdam Centre for Urban History

New project: The town as fatherland

The dynamics of urban and national identities in the Netherlands and Belgium, 1815-1914

11 July 2014

Tymen Peverelli has been awarded with one of the twenty grants offered by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) as part of the Sustainable Humanities Program for a four-year PhD project, starting in September 2014.

The project will explore the interplay between urban and national identity in
the nineteenth century by examining the appropriation of local heroes (or
viri illustres) in various Dutch and Belgian towns. It aims to provide
analytic access into the simultaneous (self-)identification and experience of
both town and nation by different social groups. In order to research this
complex of problems, the project will focus on various mnemonic practices and
media, such as historical and literary societies, museums, statues, novels and
music, and public spectacles.

Tymen Peverelli (1988) studied at the Nationalism Program of the Central
European University in Budapest and finished the Research Master in History
(cum laude) at the University of Amsterdam in 2013. A year later,
Academia Press in Ghent published his master thesis Mensentuin, which
examines the creation of national culture in the nineteenth-century Antwerp Zoo.